Yes, Trump and the GOP Have a Plan to Steal This Election If Defeated
It has pundits scratching their heads: is it just all about his ego? Is he crazy? Or crazy like a fox?I'd argue the latter: that this is part of a strategy to legally seize the White House after he's lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote, much like Republican Rutherford B. Hayes did in the election of 1876.Eight months before the 2020 election, I wrote a largely-ridiculed article for Alternet.org predicting that Trump would lose the election but would then use multiple phony slates of swing-state electors to try to get the Electoral College count thrown to the House of Representatives where, under the 12th Amendment, the Republican majority would crown him president.
At the risk of again playing the reluctant role of Cassandra, here are some examples of how Trump and the GOP could try to steal the White House this winter, regardless of how the vote turns out.
It was, after all, their constitutional right, as Rehnquist later noted in Bush v Gore.As David Barstow and Somini Sengupta wrote for the New York Times on November 28, 2000, just before the Supreme Court intervened:"The president of Florida's Senate said today that Gov. Jeb Bush had indicated his willingness to sign special legislation intended to award Florida's 25 Electoral College votes to his brother Gov. George W. Bush of Texas even as the election results were being contested."But," some say, "Kamala Harris is the Vice President, so she won't refuse to accept the Electoral College votes like Trump wanted Pence to do!" That's true, but irrelevant.
Multiple Court observers have noted how light the Court's docket is this fall because, they speculate, Roberts is fully expecting to play a role in the election similar to what five Republicans on the Court did in 2000 when they stopped the Florida recount, handing the White House to George W. Bush.The Court could then declare the election flawed because of the alleged voter fraud - Republicans across the country, as well as Trump and Vance, are already preparing the ground for this claim - and, citing the 12th Amendment, throw it to the House of Representatives.
The most likely scenario would involve local election officials gumming up the works by slow-walking counts, challenging counts, or outright refusing to certify counts at the state level long enough that several individual state votes can't be certified by January 6th, very much like in the election of 1876.
"Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump's allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week."The updated Electoral Count Act sets a hard date of December 11th for states to certify the vote, but doesn't detail any consequences or outcomes if states fail to meet that date.
"Gee, ya think? They couldn't be telegraphing their plans any more clearly if they were skywriting them.I wrapped up my March 2020 article predicting the GOP's upcoming fake elector strategy by imploring Democrats and the media to ring the alarm before they tried to pull it off:"Get it into the media and repeat it over and over again: The GOP plans to claim Democratic voter fraud in this election to steal the election for themselves, and they're already getting people primed for it!"It's worth repeating today.